FOR 11/9

ADRIAN PACI’S ‘PASSAGES’ OPENS AT PETER BLUM CHELSEA

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NEW YORK CITY — Peter Blum announces the exhibition, “Adrian Paci: Passages,” opening November 9, at Peter Blum Chelsea, 526 West 29th Street.

The various media in which Adrian Paci has worked include film, photography, painting and sculptural installation. For this exhibition, Paci has, for the first time, made three paintings on plaster, each measuring 7½ by 10 feet.

Titled “Facades,” these paintings are attached to freestanding brick walls supported in turn by old wooden beams and depict scenes extracted from videos of weddings in Albania (Paci’s place of birth). The inspiration for the imagery of “Facades,” as in many of Paci’s other works, can be traced to his difficult but necessary decision to leave Albania for Milan in 1997.

Subsequently, the memories of his past, his culture and country, as well as the reality of his separation from these, have infused his work. The nine scenes in each wall painting play with the juxtaposition of important symbolic and cultural rites (a veiled bride walking towards her future husband) and glimpses of everyday gestures during the festivities.

Paci sets the fleeting moment of each video frame against the fixed and frozen image painted on the wall. This allows the paintings to function like a window to a different place and time while simultaneously battling the physical presence of the actual walls. These brick walls allude to fragments of houses and are symbolic of the unfinished building structures often seen in the landscape in underprivileged regions of the Mediterranean.

This exhibition by Paci represents his first at Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Paci’s work can also be seen in the exhibition “Senso Unico” at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, as well as at Smith-Stewart Gallery at 53 Stanton Street, New York City.

For general information, www.peterblumgallery.com or 212-244-6055.